Vineyard Chill

We were getting ready to head to East Beach to get a load of seaweed for the garden when the phone rang. Clay Stockton's voice was the last one I expected to hear on the other end of the line. I'd not had a better friend than Clay in the army, or later, when I was on the Boston PD, but aside from a rare letter or Christmas card, I hadn't heard much from him since before I'd met Zee, so a lot of water had passed under the bridge. And unless Clay had changed, there was a fair chance some of it was hot water.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I'm up here in Boston, but I thought I might drop down to the Vineyard for a visit. You still have a spare bunk?”

“You bet. The guest room will be waiting. How are you?”

“Fine. I'll give you the details when I get there. It'll be good to see you again, buddy! I'll catch the bus and call you when I get to Woods Hole.”

I hung up, a smile on my face.

“Who was that?” asked Zee. “Whoever it was made you happy. Not an old girlfriend, I hope.”

I put my arms around her. “You're girlfriend enough for me, wifey. No, that was Clay Stockton. He's coming down from Boston.”

She looked up at me. “The Clay Stockton who writes you a note about every other year? He's the adventurer, isn't he? The one who actually lives a life that sounds like a novel?”

“That's Clay. I'm almost surprised he's still alive, but he's a really wonderful guy. You'll like him. All the ladies do. Men, too. He has charm.” I gave her a kiss. “Like me.”

She kissed me back. “You have charm, Jefferson, but not too much. We can always use a little more around the house. If we're going to the beach, we'd better get started. The kids are already in the truck.”

I glanced at my watch. The bus from Boston wouldn't get to Woods Hole for at least a couple of hours, so we had time for a seaweed run.

It was a bright, snowless mid-January day, chilly but not cold. Just right for a drive on the Chappy beaches. We could enjoy the ride and bring back several big, industrial-strength trash bags full of seaweed for the garden. Two good reasons to go. So we went.

January and February are the only months in the Martha's Vineyard year when mainlanders are rare. They start trickling down in March, and in April the trickle becomes a small stream. By May, parking places downtown are harder to find and by June, the summer season has begun in earnest. During July and August the streets are mobbed, the roads are filled with cars, and the beaches are bright with umbrellas and towels. Even after Labor Day, by which time most families with school-age children have gone home, there are still a lot of out-of-state cars parked where you want to park and lined up at stop signs. People pour over from America for the Columbus Day weekend, for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and for Last Night festivities. It's only after the turning of the year that silence falls over the island and we year-rounders have the place to ourselves for a few weeks before the cycle starts again. It's during those weeks that you have a fighting chance of actually knowing the people you meet.

But few of those people would be out on Chappy in midwinter.

We got into the old Land Cruiser and drove up our long sandy driveway. We were well bundled because I'd never managed to get the truck's heater working properly. At the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven road, I turned left and drove through Edgartown to Katama, passing the P.O., the Stop and Shop, and Al's Package Store without even slowing down—an almost impossible feat during the summer, when taking that route means dealing with the village's worst traffic jam.

When we crossed the herring creek, I shifted into four-wheel drive and we headed east on Norton Point Beach, open now to traffic but often closed during the summer because of laws in defense of piping plovers. To our north was the cold, shallow water of Katama Bay and to our south was the colder water of the Atlantic Ocean, stretching dark blue to the southern horizon, where it met the ice blue sky.

A couple of years earlier, a seventy-foot fishing boat had gone ashore on Norton's Point, causing consternation among plover protectors, who feared that curious sightseers might step on an egg or fledgling while eyeballing the grounded boat. Concern for the boat and its owners was considerably less than concern for the birds, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief when a tug finally managed to drag the fishing boat off the sand and back out to sea.

The boat was now only a memory and the plovers had all departed for those warmer places plovers visit in the winter, so we were able to fetch Chappaquiddick without delay.

When I was a boy, we could drive from Norton Point Beach over the sand directly to Wasque Point on the southeast corner of Chappy, but times had changed, so we took the road to Dyke Bridge—still, almost forty years after the accident that had made it famous, the most popular tourist site on the Vineyard and, according to those who yearned for the old days when only they and a few others knew of Chappy, the spark that had ignited the Vineyard's unfortunate flame of popularity.

Other calamities had occurred and were still occurring on the island: planes crashed, boats sank, people drowned, people shot or stabbed other people or hit them with bricks, teens killed themselves and their friends by driving into trees, people overdosed on drugs or went missing and were never seen again. The most recent of the latter was Nadine Gibson, the girl with the strawberry hair, so called because of her long, brightly dyed tresses, who had left work at the Fireside bar in Oak Bluffs the previous March and had disappeared. Had she gone back to the mainland? Had she shaved her head and moved into a nunnery? Had her apparently frantic boyfriend killed and buried her after some lovers' quarrel? No one knew. But though such disasters as these continued to occur on the island, no tourists sought out most of the fatal sites.

On the east side of the bridge, we turned and drove to Cape Pogue Pond and points north, seeing not another soul en route. We rounded the cape on the outside, following the narrow track between the water and the cliff, and spotted a seal heading toward Wasque, its sleek head disappearing underwater only to reappear farther to the south.

On the rocky north shore of the elbow, we could clearly see the Oak Bluffs bluffs, the far shore of Cape Cod, and the white houses of Edgartown. There were gulls on the water, and the waves slapped on the shingle beach.

I crossed over the neck to the pond side of the elbow, hooked a left, and there we were, on a flat beach windrowed with seaweed blown ashore by the southwest winds of recent days.

“Pa, can we fish?” Joshua asked.

“Sure, but I don't think there's much out there right now.”

“You don't know if you don't throw.”

Like father, like son. I got the small rods off the roof rack and gave them to Joshua and Diana, who went down to the water and began to make short but straight casts. They were both better at it than I had been at their ages.

“When did Joshua learn that cliché?” asked Zee, pulling plastic bags out of the back of the truck.

“That's not just a cliché,” I said. “That's ancient fishing wisdom.” I was watching Diana. She was very intent and was making nice casts for an eight-year-old. She looked like a miniature Zee: blue-black hair, dark eyes; a young panther. I allowed myself an early worry about the boys we could expect at our door in not too many years.

“Come along, dear.” Zee handed me a bag and we started filling them with seaweed. Our garden loved seaweed and we used a lot of it. As we worked, Zee said, “Tell me about Clay Stockton.”

How could I describe Clay Stockton? “I imagine I've told you most of what I know,” I said. “We met in boot camp and hit it off right away. I ended up in Nam. He didn't. We bent a few rules together and he got me out of a couple of jams. He was the only guy I knew besides me who read for fun. He introduced me to Nietzsche.”

“Smart.”

“And he has magic hands. He can build anything and fix almost anything. He's built wooden boats and he can do finish carpentry. And did I tell you he's a hypnotist?”

Zee finished stuffing one big bag. “You told me about the boats, but I don't think I've heard about him being a hypnotist. Here.” She gave the bag to me. “You're a manly man. Put this in the truck.”

“What would you do without me?” I asked, coming back from the truck and joining her in filling the next bag.

“I'd do without you.” She gave me a sweet smile. “Is he a Svengali?”

“I don't think he's ever transformed a Trilby into an opera singer, and as far as I know he's never hypnotized a fair maiden into doing anything she might not otherwise do.”

Zee's smile became a grin. “A lot of fair maidens would be glad to be hypnotized into doing things they might otherwise not do.”

“Sexist. No, Clay used to hypnotize guys in our barracks just for fun, but only if they wanted him to, and never in a way to make them look foolish. The most interesting thing I saw him do was get a guy's permission, then hypnotize him and stick a needle through the guy's hand without causing any pain or bleeding. I never have figured that one out.”

“Did he ever hypnotize you?”

“I volunteered but it didn't work. I was too busy analyzing what was happening to take the suggestions he was giving. I'm a bad subject.”

“I can vouch for that. I've had a hard time teaching you anything.”

“He was interested in psychosomatic relationships, and hypnotism was a way for him to experiment. I think what he really wanted to do was learn to hypnotize himself.”

“Did he manage to do that?”

“Not while I was around.”

“What's he look like?”

“A good-looking guy. The last time I saw him was when we were both in Boston. I was a cop, going to Northeastern part-time, and he was at BU, studying philosophy and building a Tahiti Ketch down in Quincy. We were both married by then.” I carried the second bag to the truck and brought back another one. “He's about six feet tall, on the lean side of average weight, blue eyes, brown hair. I think he might be what you call a hunk, but I'm not sure because I've never understood just what qualifies as hunkiness.”

“Leave that decision up to me, hunk. Well, he sounds pretty good so far. What's he do for a living?”

I thought about some of the things I'd read in his rare letters and said, “Maybe you could call him a pilot, because he's done some flying jobs here and there, but he's done other things, too, so I don't think you could say he has a profession. He's like me since I left the Boston PD. No steady job.”

“You keep busy.”

“So does Clay.”

“What else can you tell me?”

“I trust him.”

“Does he have children?”

A potential sore spot. “He's mentioned more than one child by more than one woman. He's been married two or three times, as near as I can figure.”

Zee and I had both been married before but had survived to try again, successful examples of the triumph of hope over experience.

“Why so many wives?” asked Zee, not being judgmental.

“You can ask him. I'd say it was because he's not a nine-to-five kind of guy and he has a lot of friends who live on the edge. Most women want a little more security than he offers. He writes about plans to settle down, but then something happens.”

“Like what?”

“Something that makes it better for him to move along.”

“Like what, Jefferson?”

“Well, once it was the woman's first husband. She hadn't gotten around to divorcing him before she married Clay. I think that was the same so-called marriage that involved some jewelry of dubious ownership. Clay thought it was his but the woman and her brother and some of the brother's friends thought it was theirs, so Clay had to slide out of town at night and couldn't go back. That sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing.”

“Another time, I remember, the wife got saved and wanted them to join a commune of fundamentalist Christians, but he didn't care for it when they got there, so he left but she stayed.”

“And he remained unsaved, I presume.”

“As far as I know.”

“How long does he plan to stay with us?”

“I didn't ask him.”

Joshua had gotten tired of fishing where there were no fish and had put his rod on the sand so he could skip stones for a while. I left the seaweed bag and walked down to him.

“You never put your rod on the sand,” I said. “You can get sand in your reel. If you're through fishing, put your rod in a spike on the front of the truck.”

Joshua's lower lip went out.

“And if that was my reel, I'd rinse it off,” I added, and walked back to the seaweed bags.

Being a boy isn't easy, and neither is being a father. I pretended to be concentrating on filling the next bag, and after a bit, Joshua and Diana both came up from the water and put their rods in the rod spikes in front of the radiator.

Diana came closer and smiled a good-girl smile. “I didn't put my rod on the sand, Pa.”